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The day the Humane Ai Pin died, it was also reborn. Or at least, there was hope.

On February 28, shortly after noon Pacific time, Humane switched off its servers supporting its contentious Ai Pin—essentially bricking a $700 device that was less than a year old. Minutes later, in a Discord voice chatroom labelled “The death of Ai Pin,” one member of a band of dedicated hackers, determined to keep their Pins alive, let the rest of the group in on a secret. He had the codes they needed to get through Humane’s authentication.

Humane’s gadget has been the poster child of AI-enhanced hardware disappointments. The cute, clippable device was meant to hang on a lapel or shirt pocket and let you carry out many of the functions you’d find in a phone—take pictures, display text messages, and order around an AI chatbot, all with some added pizazz in the form of Humane’s promised holographic laser displays.

Released to the world in April 2024, the Pin was an immediate disappointment. Its main features simply did not work well, and from there things just got worse. The Pin was a resounding flop, widely mocked, and the company even reached the point where it processed more returns of the device than it had sold. In February 2025, less than a year after the Pin was released, Humane announced it would shut down its services at the end of the month—Friday, February 28—and part off some of its key AI components to the computer company HP. Humane offered few concessions to Pin owners. Refunds would only be given if someone had purchased a Pin within the past 90 days.

For the remaining fans of the expensive, short-lived device, the move was a gut punch. In the final week of the Humane Ai Pin’s short life, soon-to-be-former users ran through all of the stages of grief across Humane’s subreddits and Discord servers. There were furious rebukes. Heartbroken goodbyes. Disappointment all around.

“We’re super bummed,” says a Humane Pin user who asked to go by his X handle, @23box_, or just “23” out of fear of being targeted by “a multi-billion dollar company beholden to shareholders.” He was an early adopter and evangelist for Humane’s device, who says he used the Humane Ai Pin regularly, up until the minute it went out of service. “This is a super unique device that we used almost every day for almost a year. We really just wanted this to have a good run.”

The official Humane Discord was shut down the morning of February 27. Luckily, 23 had already decided to start a separate Discord server for Humane refugees, called reHumane, in an effort to pursue unsanctioned forays into deconstructing the Pin, away from the watchful eye of Humane or HP.

“We didn’t want them to know what we were doing,” 23 says.

Marcel, another user who gave only his first name to avoid exposing himself to reprisal from HP, saw the end of Humane’s brief era as something exciting. He is used to tearing things like this apart. He has constructed his own PlayStation Portal out of a Nintendo Switch. He was one of the first people to transfer the Rabbit R1 source code onto an Android phone (much to the chagrin of a company that insisted its device was not simply an Android app).

The Humane Ai Pin lineup. Courtesy of Humane

As soon as Humane announced it would be bricking the device, he hurried to figure out how to crack the thing open. Lots of people on the Discord felt the same way—where once they owned a misunderstood, widely mocked device, now there was an opportunity.

“Everyone was pretty psyched to get into this,” Marcel says.

The Humane Ai Pin runs an instance of Android as its OS, which means in theory the system could be debugged and have custom apps sideloaded onto it. But the Pin needed to be able to connect to another computer to do that. Since Humane’s service was being shut down, wireless features wouldn’t work—so it had to be a wired connection. But the Humane Ai Pin has no obvious ports, so finding a way to plug it in wasn’t immediately apparent.

In a Discord channel dedicated to modifying the Pin, users quickly figured out how to uncover the hidden DIM connectors—they were covered with a moon-shaped sticker of Humane’s logo—that would enable a wired connection from the Pin to a computer. The problem was the connectors were tiny, barely 1 millimeter apart, and nobody had any other cords that would fit. After trying several different connector types, Marcel and other tinkerers opted to create their own. Marcel sliced up four different USB cables looking for one with the right wires that could connect to the sensors on the Pin. He soldered them on, plugged the other end of the cord into his computer, and had them connected. Maybe this wasn’t the end after all.

But there was another problem. Humane shutting down services meant it would brick the device completely, making the operating system on the Pin inaccessible. Without an authentication certificate to open the OS, owners who had managed to get it hooked up to their computers were greeted with an impassable screen. Marcel, and the community at large, were stuck. It was technically possible to hack it—the right geek can hack just about anything eventually—but getting through that authentication was a different matter.

In the meantime, the community responded by organizing and sharing what they could. Brendan Brannock, a 30-year-old network engineer in Florida also working on a way to connect with his Humane Pin, put together a knowledge base document to help other people in the community start tinkering with their devices. He found a compatible wiring device on Amazon that would connect to the Humane Pin’s port and fiddled his way into building a 3D model of a base that would hold the connection in place. He shared the base model on the Discord so anyone with access to a 3D printer could make one for themselves. Connecting the cables still wasn’t easy, but making the resources widely available meant more people could get cracking on the project.

Brannock bought the Pin because he says he is interested in the frontiers of technology. He has self-implanted three NFC chips under his skin (“I had a little bit of help from a couple glasses of whiskey,” he says) that let him do things like start his car, unlock the doors on his house, and log into his password-protected accounts on a computer. The Humane Pin fit right into that spirit of DIY techno experimentation.

“The goal for any device like this is to make it do more,” Brannock says, “Get the most out of your money.”

Humane owners on the reHumane Discord had wanted the company to put out an OTA—an over the air update that would enable them to access the OS on the device. Humane, in its downward spiral toward dissolution, didn’t outwardly make any moves to do that.

The Humane Ai Pin has a built-in projector designed to show messages on your outstretched hand. Courtesy of Humane

Still, the word got out, and shortly after the device was shut down on February 28, Marcel had an announcement. Somebody from Humane—he would never say who—had slipped him and a few other users an internal certificate used by employees that would grant access to the Pin.

In the Discord voice chat, Marcel broke the news by sharing his screen and playing a video. In it, he held out his hand, and across his palm the Humane Ai Pin’s laser projector played the music video for Nomico’s “Bad Apple,” which has become a meme as the first video hackers put on a jailbroken device. The chat went wild. The Ai Pin was theirs.

Marcel’s proclamation caused chaos, as some of the people in the community who also knew about this development were hoping to hold off a week or two longer. If they tinkered away quietly, after all the fuss had died down, perhaps invested interests like the remnants of Humane and HP would be less inclined to force another update to undo the access that had been granted.

“If we had been quiet about this,” Marcel said in the voice channel, “it would have taken months and people would have just sold the device and just forgotten about it. This has been a very cool send away from Humane services, and hopefully a new era for these devices.”

However, a Humane employee, who requested anonymity due to not being authorised to speak publicly on such matters, also expressed his frustrations with the community’s actions. He pointed out that using proprietary access certifications without permission is an IP violation—one that HP, which now owns Humane’s IP, may or may not want to pursue.

He also says that Humane owners wouldn’t have had to wait all that long for a legitimate fix. Employees at Humane were in the process of going through the proper channels to put out an OTA that would give people access without compromising IP rights. Now, that process might be stalled.

“We did not want those Pins to remain bricks on desks, and have been working hard to figure out ways around it,” the Humane employee tells WIRED. If anything, he seems disappointed. “Discussing making Android apps and the quirks of developing for the Pin is one thing. But this is crossing the line.”

What exactly Pin users even want to do with the device after they crack it open depends on who you ask. Some of them have grand ambitions, like a user in the voice channel who said, “I keep telling them they should just make this thing shoot lasers.” Marcel wants to figure out how the thing works, and back up the data to explore later. Brannock and 23 both want to use the Pin for precisely what it is: a smartphone replacement that doesn’t require staring at a screen. Others in the community feel the same.

“One of my favorite things about the Pin was capturing memories without a screen between us and our son,” wrote one poster on the Discord, sharing a video of his toddler’s first steps, captured by the Pin.

Ultimately, the people breaking these devices open really want what they felt like Humane promised them, then ultimately failed to keep alive. They want a device that can capture photos and videos, support some large language model or another, and be used to interact with the world without having to pull a phone out of their pocket.

“There’s a reason we got these devices,” 23 says. “We want to get back to where we were as a society before we had to stare at screens. A lot of us really do just want to touch grass sometimes.”

After Marcel made his announcement, the Discord voice chat wound down. Except now the channel had a different description. In place of “The death of Ai Pin,” it read, “We’re so back.”

Updated March 1, 2025 at 2:39am: Included a response from a Humane employee who reached out to WIRED after this story published, including details about potential IP rights violations and internal efforts at Humane to provide access. We also corrected references to Humane AI Pin’s authentication, which were previously incorrectly referred to as encryption.